


It Wasn't Yours to Keep

by doyoushipwhoiship



Category: The Goldfinch (2019), The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Angst, Boreo (obviously), Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Nostalgia, Sad theo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-03
Updated: 2020-04-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:47:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23453494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doyoushipwhoiship/pseuds/doyoushipwhoiship
Summary: He loves him. It's not even a realization because he's always known. The painting was never Theo's to keep, but what about Boris's heart?
Relationships: Theodore Decker & Boris Pavlikovsky, Theodore Decker/Boris Pavlikovsky
Kudos: 26





	It Wasn't Yours to Keep

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from a Hobie quote (film, not book, though I've yet to check if it's in both places). I'm new here and love feedback, so feel free to leave a comment or kudos. Enjoy!

I pushed a hand through my hair; stared forward; the city moved under me like water below a bridge. The haste of humanity. So fast, so loud, when all I wanted was quiet and slow. I was alone. I had my memories to entertain me, projected, as I imagined them, from a single hotel television, throwing flashes of warm orange light on my cool blue face. I was so cold. And I hadn’t known it then, but I knew it now: Boris. Boris was warmth.

When we were still kids and Dad and Xandra were out, he’d come over and sit on one of our barstools, knees too far apart in baggy black jeans, and watch me while I cooked for him. It was usually a T-bone I’d stuffed under my shirt at the supermarket—well, not my shirt, his shirt, though back then we shared so many clothes I couldn’t tell; our styles, like our minds, had merged—and he’d rest his bruised face in an equally damaged hand, smiling lopsidedly and saying “Bloody, Potter, bloody,” because that was his life and that’s how he wanted it.

Popchyk got the bone and leftovers when we finished. Boris never ate his share but waved it off when I pressed him, underfed, for more: “Was free anyway,” a statement that made my skin itch, because it wasn’t free, I’d only stolen it, and was I giving in to some hidden instinct? I wondered, horrified, in my fifteen-year-old, perpetually semi-drunk state—Some concealed kleptomania my mother had known about but never spoke of? “Yes,” she might have said to relatives, “I can’t take him anywhere!” And not as a joke. That Theo. Everyone knows. He’s always stuffing tchotchkes in his pockets. Stealing sweets. Maybe my destiny of theft didn’t begin with ‘The Goldfinch.’ Maybe it had always been there, even before the museum.

I’d stolen items from victims immediately following the blast but I’d needed them—the flashlight, the backpack, the bottle of water—so that was different. Of course, Welty’s ring, but hadn’t he given it to me? A stab of guilt, twisting in me, and for more than one reason. Hobie. Pippa. Mrs. Barbour. Kitsey. Why couldn’t I stop? All I did was let everyone down.

I was always taking more than I gave, but the world had taken enough from me, hadn’t it? Taking the painting had been my retribution against the universe. And it wasn’t a crime of purpose like when my father tried to steal the money my mother left for me, nor was it a crime of passion as when Mr. Pavlikovsky came home and hit the son he didn’t love; no, mine had been a crime of opportunity.

But Hobie was right. It wasn’t mine to keep, and it wasn’t a matter of whether I deserved it or not, wasn’t a matter of whether I had balanced the cosmic scales on which I’d been consistently outweighed, because of course I’d spent all those years being so sure of something—so certain that the painting was safely stored—only to find out that Boris had shouldered my burden instead. My crime had been to steal, and Boris had stolen it back. My crime was now his, and despite the guilt I carried for a decade, alongside the torch I’d always held for him, I had lost the painting. I had lost all hope. I had lost my mind.

I needed to return to myself. I felt like Popchyk, anxious for my pending arrival while Boris and I made the daily trek from the school bus to our homes. I sat by the window in my apartment like I’d waited all those hours for my mom: turning all the lights on, cleaning, thinking when she got home and was safe and we reunited she’d be pleased. I had nothing to clean here; it was my third residence besides Hobie’s brownstone and the rent-share place where Kitsey stayed when she wasn’t at Tom Cable’s, and aside from me, a few clothes, drugs and drinks, it was empty.

I was no longer waiting for my mom, and I wasn’t waiting for Kitsey, either—I wondered what she thought of me now, and whether or not we were still technically engaged—but I would wait for Boris. I would wait as long as it took.

We had found each other once, (“I was so ashamed…Still so ashamed”), but this time, if he ever found his way back to me again, it would be my turn to speak, to share my secret, to say the words we never exchanged as nervous teenagers in the street, to steal back from him the thing which, besides the painting, I never deserved in the first place. His heart.


End file.
